Tackling Diabetes With a Bold New Dietary Approach by Neal Barnard (Full Transcript)

Neal Barnard

Full text of Neal Barnard, on Tackling Diabetes With a Bold New Dietary Approach at TEDxFremont conference

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TRANSCRIPT:

Today, I’d like to talk about turning around an epidemic. 100 million Americans right now do have either diabetes or pre-diabetes, and that puts them at risk for amputations, for heart disease, for blindness and we’re exporting this epidemic overseas.

Now the word epidemic comes from Old Greek: ‘epi’ means ‘on’, ‘demos’ means ‘people’, so an epidemic is something we study with sterile statistics, and maps, and graphs, but the truth is, it’s something that impinges directly on people, on living, breathing human-beings.

But my story actually starts in the basement of a Minneapolis hospital. The year before I went to medical school, I was the morgue attendant, or as I’d like to say, the autopsy assistant. What that meant was, whenever anybody died, I would bring the body out of the cooler, and put the body on an examination table, and the pathologist would come into the room.

And one day, a person died in a hospital of a massive heart attack. Probably from eating hospital food, but that’s another story.